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Sunday, July 18, 2004

More on Madlax Operating Systems

While Madlax is not a geek anime, here I'd like to introduce some of computers used in the anime.

The True Cluter super computer:

OK 這種事的話 就該True-Cluster出場了 True-Cluster? 上個月才啟動的新型機 用兩千三百台市面上的電腦構築起來的超級電腦 以262.4T FLOPS的速度進行運算 這個系統的速度相當於世界第四 而且還是個人所有

The desktop environment looks very much like GNOME. The operating system should be *nix because I found "/" used in the paths (not "\" used in Windows).

Desktop:
File manager:
File managers popping out:
It was hijacked:

In Madlax, people still uses keyboard. But they look much cooler (but not necessarily healthy to the hands). They are transparent and growing...

The Mac-style keyboard (notice the [Return] key):
The Win-style keyboard (notice the [Enter] key):

posted by minghong @ 7/18/2004 01:49:00 am  

4 Comments:

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  • At 7/29/2004 05:48:00 am, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    Vanessa has Darwin on her notebook. You can clearly see that in (at least) one episode when she logs in. It's nice to see that anime uses realistic computer screens while "normal" films usually use completely ridiculous fake screens e.g., super-huge fonts and dialogs, blinking warnings etc.

     

  • At 7/29/2004 08:48:00 am, Blogger minghong said…

    Hmm... How do you know it is Darwin? From the shell? I'm just curious... It's good to see someone also care about this (while many people thought that I was too crazy to capture so many screenshots).

    By the way, I had installed Darwin once. I thought it would be just like Mac OS X. Stupid me... I was wrong.

    Also, unlike other Linuxs, e.g. Feroda (Red Hat), Mandrake, which bundles with GNOME/KDE (and with more updated drivers). So, I had only use it for a few minutes.

    I don't have any Linux as desktop anyway... I tried. I failed. I'm not satisfactory with the Chinese support in Linux. I prefer an OS (or desktop environment) that the input methods are independent of the locale, e.g. having an English Windows with all those Chinese, Japanese, Korean input methods available.

     

  • At 8/04/2004 07:27:00 am, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    Just watch Episode #4 and look at the notebook screen after ~160 seconds. You'll see a blurry "Welcome to Darwin!" in the upper left. I'm not sure why but I've noticed that immediately. Darwin is not a Linux but a BSD based on FreeBSD, IIRC. Unlike Linux distributions BSDs clearly differ between the "base" system (which is considered part of the operating system) and third-party software. They usually provide pretty good package systems for the latter with several thousand packages. Linux is just a kernel, not an operating system, so every distribution decides for itself which software packages are part of (their version of) the operating system and which are supplementary.

    So the typical desktop user which comes from Mac OS, Linux or other systems has a little more to do - or rather decide - to get started. Beyond that there's not much of a user-visible difference - especially not between any Unix/BSDs.

    I think GNOME 2.x has pretty good support for asian and arabic languages but I presume there's too little communication between asian/arabic and european/american developers so that many software is optimized for one of the regions. In my experience developers are fully aware of internationalization (I18N) problems but if you don't use something on a daily basis it's hard to fix problems which don't bug you if you aware of them at all. For example, I have no idea how a Japanese keyboard looks or how they enter kanji, whether Japanese people use mostly English or Japanese filenames etc.

     

  • At 8/04/2004 09:21:00 am, Blogger minghong said…

    Wow, you really have a good eye!

    Back to the OS issue: I found that the non-English fonts in *nix and BSD are often ugly... I don't know who design those fonts. Maybe that's because the font was made by developers, not (graphical) designers. I'm not sure of course.

    Also, font antialiasing can be a problem. Because unlike latin characters, Chinese characters are often much more complicated (just take a look of the number of pen strokes). Japanese/Korean characters are more simplified, but still more complex than latin charcters. So antialiasing makes the text look blurry. I think you might have encountered then you use your Darwin to view Asian webpages...

    However, I've seen Chinese characters under Safari, they look ok through even the fonts are antialiased (they are still a little bit blurry). So maybe it is still the problem of the fonts... (or the method how they do antialiasing?)

     

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